Libya is located in northern Africa with
the Gulf of Sidra and the Mediterranean Sea to the north.
Libya is bordered by Egypt to
east, Sudan to
the southeast, Chad and
Niger to
the south, Algeria to
the west and Tunisia to
the northwest. Libya is slightly larger than Alaska.
More than 90 percent of the country is either desert or
semi-desert; only one percent of the land is arable. The
capital, Tripoli, is located on the Mediterranean Sea.
Libya is an authoritarian state ruled by Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi since his military coup in 1969. In the 1990s the UN imposed sanctions on Libya for state sponsored terrorism. These sanctions were lifted in 2003. The U.S. resumed full diplomatic relations with the country in May 2006. The currency is the Libyan dinar.
The July 2007 estimate of the population was 6,036,914 with a population growth rate of 2.3 percent. The current life expectancy is 76.88 years with women outliving men by four and a half years.
There is no official language in the country: Arabic, Italian, and English are all widely used in the major cities. Libya has an 82.6 percent literacy rate of people over the age of 15 with 20 percent more men being literate than women. The majority religion is Islam with 97 percent of the population Sunni Muslim.
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